Creating PDF files with all fonts embedded

A number of publishers, conferences, and grant agencies
(e.g. IEEE, ACM, NSF) have very specific requirements
for submission of PDF documents. In order to avoid problems
with differences among fonts, they require that all fonts
are "type 1," "embedded," and "subsetted." Unfortunately, this is
not the default for most PDF writers, which typically assume that
the "standard 14" fonts do not need embedding.

The details on how to produce these "safe" PDF files vary from system to system,
depending on the software versions and file locations in place on your system.

For the URCS RedHat9 Linux systems, copy these two files into the directory with your latex document, and use "pdflatex" to create your PDF file:

Other Linux/Unix distributions will need similar accommodation, and a map file can be produced by editing the script /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/updmap, instructing it to omit Adobe built-in fonts and use the URW/Nimbus fonts.

There are ways to use dvips and ps2pdf, but I haven't tried them, so they are beyond the scope of this note. You may need to investigate this route if you can't get pdflatex to embed your figures.

Once you produce a PDF file, you can use the program "pdffonts" to
examine the file -- make sure that all fonts are listed as Type 1,
embedded "yes", subsetted "yes".